Milton Krasner - Writer

Cinematographer.
Nationality:
American.
Born:
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1901; sometimes credited as Milton R.
Krasner.
Career:
Joined Vitagraph in New York as laboratory worker, then assistant editor;
camera assistant and second cameraman for various studios in Hollywood in
the 1920s; 1933—first film as cinematographer,
Strictly Personal
; TV work includes the series
Macmillan and Wife
and
Macmillan
, 1971–76.
Award:
Academy Award for
Three Coins in the Fountain
, 1954.
Died:
Of heart failure, in Los Angeles, California, 16 July 1988.

She's Dangerous
(Foster and Carruth);
We Have Our Moments
(Werker);
Oh, Doctor
(McCarey);
Love in a Bungalow
(McCarey);
The Lady Fights Back
(Carruth);
There Goes the Groom
(Santley);
A Girl with Ideas
(Simon);
Prescription for Romance
(Simon)

1938

The Jury's Secret
(Sloman);
Midnight Intruder
(Lubin);
The Crime of Dr. Hallett
(Simon);
The Nurse from Brooklyn
(Simon);
The Devil's Party
(McCarey);
The Missing Guest
(Rawlins);
The Storm
(Young);
Newsboys Home
(Young)

1939

You Can't Cheat an Honest Man
(Marshall);
The Family Next Door
(Santley);
The House of Fear
(May);
I Stole a Million
(Tuttle);
Missing Evidence
(Rosen);
Little Accident
(Lamont);
The Man from Montreal
(Cabanne)

Publications

By KRASNER: articles—

Seminar with Robert Wise in
American Cinematographer
(Hollywood), March 1980.

In
Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of the Golden Age
, edited by Pat McGilligan, Berkeley, California, 1986.

On KRASNER: articles—

Allen, Leigh, on
All about Eve
in
American Cinematographer
(Hollywood), January 1951.

Balter, Allan, in
American Cinematographer
(Hollywood), December 1955.

Rowan, Arthur, on
Boy on a Dolphin
in
American Cinematographer
(Hollywood), May 1957.

Lightman, Herb A., on
The St. Valentine's Day Massacre
in
American Cinematographer
(Hollywood), October 1967.

Film Comment
(New York), Summer 1972.

Focus on Film
(London), no. 13, 1973.

Kimble, G., on
How the West Was Won
in
American Cinematographer
(Hollywood), October 1983.

Turner, George, in
American Cinematographer
(Hollywood), September 1986.

Obituary in
Variety
(New York), 20 July 1988.

Obituary in
American Cinematographer
(Hollywood), September 1988.

Obituary in
EPD Film
(Frankfurt), vol. 5, no. 10, October 1988.

* * *

Milton Krasner's film career, spanning the years 1919 to 1975,
illustrates two fundamental aspects of the life of a craftsman in
Hollywood's Golden Age. First, the long and arduous (some,
wistfully, would say luxurious) apprenticeship of the young technician.
Second, the extreme diversity possible even within a segregated crafts
system. Krasner, as an example, worked in black-and-white and color,
standard format and widescreen, in a variety of genres, for a multitude of
directors, at all the major studios. Indeed, Krasner's career is of
such breadth that his development as a cinematographer in many ways
parallels the maturation of the art itself, as well as the manner in which
the studio system of production appropriated that art.

Krasner began his career in the lab (and for a brief stint, in the cutting
room) at the Vitagraph Studios in Brooklyn. From that position, he
graduated to assistant cameraman, loading and unloading magazines, working
the slate, and carrying gear. Moving to California in the early 1920s,
Krasner worked on Broncho Billy Anderson westerns, Johnny Hines comedies
for First National, and, most significantly, with Sol Polito on Harry
Carey westerns at Pathé. At Universal, beginning in 1927, he worked
with the crack team of Polito and Ted McCord on Ken Maynard westerns for
several years.

By the time of Krasner's first credit as director of photography,
he had worked at nearly every studio in Hollywood, major and minor, and
had assisted such cinematographers as McCord, Polito, Billy Bitzer, Lee
Garmes, Lucien Andriot, Hal Mohr, and Joseph Walker. If there is a
difficulty in detecting a "Krasner style" in his later work,
perhaps this is due to the multiplicity of influences bearing on him
during his long apprenticeship.

By late 1935, Krasner was located at Universal Studios, and between 1937
and 1944, made 54 films. The budgets were low, but his competence and
craftsmanship gained a name in the industry.

The 1940s were the breakthrough period for Krasner. His long
apprenticeship ended, he could finally work at a slower pace on the
black-and-white horror and crime features he was increasingly specializing
in, as well as begin work in other genres. His most important assignment
in this respect was the Technicolor
Arabian Nights
, an Ali Baba-esque epic for which he and his two co-cinematographers
received an Academy Award nomination. But Krasner's best work in
this period, and the work which gained him the greatest notoriety, were
the two films done under director Fritz Lang,
The Woman in the Window
and
Scarlet Street
. The films remain two of Krasner's most dramatic creations, and
feature some of the most characteristic imagery in the
film noir
canon.
The Woman in the Window
's lush, modern apartment set, in which much of the film's
action takes place, is imbued with a rich range of gray tones by Krasner,
giving the set an air of complexity and suspense. Krasner's camera
moves effortlessly from one set-up to another. Though not then noted for
dramatic treatment of interior space, Krasner here shows an excellent
story sense. The exterior of the apartment building, on the other hand, is
a triumph, and the image of a rain-soaked street (shot in the Goldwyn
lot), its deserted brownstone fronts receding in geometric regularity into
deep space, has become an icon of the genre.
Scarlet Street
played to the cinematographer's strength. The backlot street scene
of this film (which in structure and plot is virtually identical to
Woman in the Window
), is expanded into an entire sequence. Krasner's work, this time
on the Universal backlot, has a rare (for him) expressionist flavor.
Edward G. Robinson, a timid bank clerk, witnesses a mock fight between
Joan Bennett and her scheming boyfriend, Dan Duryea. Charaters in both
films, moreover, move from interior to exterior space within the same
sequences, and exterior space is constantly alluded to through open
windows and doorways. Soundstage-shot, false exteriors and backlot streets
give these films a Baroque style all their own. Lotte Eisner, writing
about
The Woman in the Window
, noted the remarkable effect of
noir
stylistics combined with Krasner's subtle exploration of cinematic
space in the film's most dramatic scene, the murder of an intruder:
"As a new taxi drives up outside the apartment building, rain is
pouring down. It is the kind of rain that produces an unnerving insecurity
and hints at potential catastrophe. Horror and brutality are about to
invade the cool, civilized interior of the luxury apartment."

Increasingly lightweight, even hand-held cameras, faster film stocks, and
improvements in set design (such as the use of "wild" walls,
removable during a tracking motion) abetted Krasner's natural
abilities in the late 1940s. He was drawn more and more, as was the case
with colleagues such as Franz Planer, to storyboarding sequences early in
the production process. This sophistication was responsible for the look
of one of Krasner's great accomplishments,
The Set-Up
. This brilliant, low-budget fight film is played in real time, on sets
whose spatial relationship to one another is an integral part of the
story. Krasner used three cameras for the fight sequences, including a
hand-held camera used in the ring. The director, Robert Wise, an
experienced editor (he had cut both
Citizen Kane
and
The Magnificent Ambersons
), cut this sequence himself, and the combined efforts of Krasner and Wise
make the extended sequence (it takes up roughly one sixth of the film) one
of the best of its kind, in a genre (the fight film) noted for its
remarkable camerawork. The rest of the film is a cameraman's
soliloquy. There are low-angle expressionist shots of distorted, screaming
faces of bloodthirsty fans in extreme close-up, long, arching tracks-in
across streets, multiple setups in tiny interior spaces. The film even
throws in a bit of location footage, as well: in an emotive moment, the
hero's wife tears up a ticket to the fight and scatters it over
trolley tracks. With this fillip, Krasner demonstrates facility with every
major cinematographic device in one 72-minute, low-budget film.

Krasner's other work at RKO in this period, notably
Holiday Affair
, also demonstrated an increased technical skill, particularly with
miniatures. RKO's special effects department was known as the best
in the industry at this time, and Krasner's exposure to
RKO's matte painters, lab technicians, and miniature builders might
be said to constitute the last part of his lengthy, productive
apprenticeship in the motion picture industry.

In 1949, Krasner began a fruitful relationship with the
writer-director-producer Joseph Mankiewicz, and an even longer
relationship with 20th Century-Fox. After working on two thrillers with
Mankiewicz,
House of Strangers
and
No Way Out
, Krasner was chosen to photograph
All about Eve
, an extremely theatrical and carefully blocked story of shifting
allegiances and loyalties in the world of the theater. Krasner literalized
this motif through his use of exclusionary framing, staging within the
frame, and subtle manipulation of the film's basic shot scale, the
medium shot. Krasner's camera gently narrates
All about Eve
, operating in parallel but muted fashion to Mankiewicz's shrill,
talky screenplay.

The 1950s and 1960s saw Krasner, now among the upper ranks of Hollywood
cinematographers, attain the role of full collaborator on major projects.
As the industry changed, Krasner also changed with apparent ease. He
adapted well to huge budgets, European locales, different color processes,
and widescreen formats. Krasner shot the second film in CinemaScope,
Demetrius and the Gladiators
, and won an Academy Award for his color and location work on
Three Coins in the Fountain
. Krasner demonstrated a certain ability to work in the more expensive,
cumbersome, widescreen processes, and he was a natural choice to serve
with Charles Lang, William Daniels, and Joseph La Shelle on one of only
two features fully produced in Cinerama,
How the West Was Won
. Krasner shot the entire last section of the film, "The
Outlaws" (for which Henry Hathaway has claimed most of the
directing credit) and many scenes in the rest of the film. The
cinematographers found the Cinerama system daunting: because of the
separate optical targets of the three-in-one camera format, three
vanishing points could potentially appear on screen, and, though
synchronized, the edges of each camera's field had to be carefully
"blended" through skillful placement of trees and other
vertical set elements, while cameramen had to be equally careful not to
let a horizontal element stray across the "blend line."
Moreover, cameras couldn't be tilted or panned during a scene. In
fact, to compensate for the distortion, actors at the edges of the
Cinerama image had to stand
behind
actors near the center of the image in order to be seen on the same depth
plane. Krasner's section is the one least demanding the Cinerama
treatment, and is as visually rich as any of his work in this
period—quite an accomplishment, given the limitations of the
format.

With
The St. Valentine's Day Massacre
, Krasner came full circle. Shooting mostly on a backlot dressed to look
like 1920s Chicago, Krasner found himself advising the young Roger Corman
how to get the feel of classical black-and-white photography on color
stock. Corman found Krasner's ability to combine interior and
exterior
shooting in the same sequence especially important to the dramatic needs
of the story. Parts of the film were shot in "documentary
style," and the entire film was done in a modified widescreen
process (Panavision). The film was carefully storyboarded, but a sequence
depicting an argument between two characters was improvised with hand-held
work. Thus Krasner reviewed techniques and specific skills learned in 45
years of work.

Milton Krasner's career in the movies is a testament to an ethic of
patience, an industry's willingness to nurture talent, and the
extraordinary variety of ways that talent was allowed to express itself
when finally it did come to fruition.

—Kevin Jack Hagopian

User Contributions:

Comment about this article, ask questions, or add new information about this topic: